The Bootblack Stand
Dr. George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, is celebrating the publication of his new book, which is now available at avant-garde bookstores throughout New Jersey. Dr....
...Ralph Waldo Emerson Third, in order to endure the daily grind that exists even in the sweetest society one must possess at least an emotional attachment to the social order, and as Kenneth Minogue has reminded us, it is extremely difficult to have an emotional commitment to our kind of liberal society, given its context...
...The characteristics they embrace will not allow them to satisfy that appetite...
...Indeed it seems to me that the whole dynamics of the society in which we live makes the existence and the point of view of intellectuals inevitable...
...According to Joseph Schumpeter this was ever meant to be, for liberal capitalism actually emboldens the mentality of the intellectual...
...He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness...
...And it is my contention that, as I hope I have suggested from the above analysis, they never will have their just society...
...Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind...
...And capitalism in the words of Irving Kristol promised three things...
...Another reason that liberal capitalism is incapable of propitiating its critics is that to defend our terribly complicated liberal capitalism the citizenry would have to possess an intellectual subtlety that is utterly beyond it...
...Secondly, it promised an equally unprecedented measure of individual freedom for all these same citizens...
...Is there any truth to the rumor that your IQ ranks in the "vegetable" category...
...As penance I intend to stand on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral and perform the tango for twenty-four straight hours while ingesting nothing more nourishing than chile dogs and peppers...
...One reason for this is that it is "an error to believe that political attack arises from grievance and that it can be turned by justification...
...If I have chosen the wrong race let me know...
...Sidney Dome's Weird Sex Rites of Small Rocks and Lichens, and several months before the Book-of-the-Month Club featured Sister Mary Torrid's The Joys of Sado-Masochism...
...This sort of ad hominem argument is despicable...
...GWP Dear Desert Demosthenes: It has been brought to my attention that in your October column you vilified me and cast aspersions on my very intelligence...
...the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values...
...Plunkitt's book is about the importance of altruism in politics and it is titled What's in It for Me...
...R. Emmett Tyrreil, Jr...
...Finally with all of the money floating about in our society, well, let's face it, it pays to blow spitballs at the system...
...Capitalism is so successful at producing goods and services that the need for its function is eventually lost in an avalanche of transistorized components, electric gadgets, trashy houses, preposterous automobiles--mass-produced goods that but a generation ago were considered luxuries...
...And the bourgeois is incapable of preventing this animus to swell up...
...Regarding your immediate question I believe there was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection several months ago which discussed the sexual longings of saltwater bivalves...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...And while liberal capitalism was producing many wondrous and advanced blossoms, intellectuals were slowly multiplying and crawling throughout the vines...
...The Alternative December 1973 25...
...First of all it promised continued improvement in the material conditions of all of its citiT~ens--a promise without precedent in history...
...Further, capitalism creates '~a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own...
...Although Dr...
...Peace and Freedom and an Open Sky, Jane Fonda Dear Miss Fonda: Once again you have thrown me...
...Well, the intellectuals have their affluence and they have their freedom...
...Now every society promises something or other...
...Great American Series Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist...
...Capitalist rationality does not eliminate subrational or superrational impulses, rather it encourages them by eliminating the restraints of a sense of the sacred...
...Plunkitt expects to earn ten million dollars from sales of his new book, he has agreed to continue to advise public figures through this column...
...Senator Montoya Dear Senator Montoya: I fully apologize for my animadversions on you and on your race...
...And because of the eminence they maintain and the characteristics they embrace, it is unlikely that there are any adjustments minor or major that we can make which will assuage this furious crisis in confidence...
...The most smashing refutation of an antagonist will not necessarily silence him...
...Any student of political discourse in America today knows that there is no way either Mr...
...If your mind continues to develop, you may replace Kingman Brewster as president of Yale...
...I can always choose another dance...
...You have not only insulted me but also my race...
...GWP talism, our bourgeois state, are inimical to intellectuals...
...And to believe that this will happen in the more ideological salons of the intellectuals is to be dulcetly idealistic, but to be naive nonetheless...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...And lastly, it held out the promise that, amidst this prosperity and liberty, the individual could satisfy his instinct for self-perfection --for leading a virtuous life that satisfied the demands of his spirit (or, as one used to say, his soul)--and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society...
...I am curious about life, and sensitive to all the wondrous beauties therein...
...Dear Mr...
...After watching your latest performances on television I want to compliment you for being one of the few men I have known to be able to sleep with his eyes open...
...from an attitude which spurns allegiance to extra-rational values, it does not follow that rational refutation will be accepted" by the critics themselves...
...I demand an apology...
...But most certainly they do not have their just society or their sense of a just society...
...What I want to know is, how do clams have sex...
...It came out the month before Dr...
...Plunkitt: As you can see from all the things I have been doing I have taken to improving my mind...
...From the fact that criticism of the capitalist order proceeds from a critical attitude of mind, i.e...
...Schumpeter feels that "the capitalist process produced that atmosphere of almost universal hostility to its own social order...
...Nixon or Mr...
...Incidentally, I was hasty in my judgment of your intellect...
...Not so long as our society is liberal, democratic, and capitalist---even welfare capitalist...
...The system of higher education with its propensity for sectional unemployment, underemployment, and the tendency, for example, to mass-produce highly sensitized schoolteachers who will earn less than truck drivers (how often have you heard them grouse about this) is a perfect example of one of our liberal institutions cultivating its own cancers...
...Liberal capitalism or modern bourgeois society while creating many marvels shaped a thing called intellectuals (I will not say liberal capitalism created intellectuals because they existed in slightly different forms centuries ago in monasteries and in the courts of aristocrats, high-toned joints like that...
...McGoo or others like them are going in the midst of a campaign to blush and fess up that they have been out to lunch...
Vol. 7 • December 1973 • No. 3
